Q2 P1

You added a very powerful skill to your tool belt recently: working with the terminal. It is now time to put it into practice and become fluent with running commands through the shell. You might be tempted to use the user interface with the mouse, but please refrain and stick to the terminal (and keyboard).

Here are some tips before you begin:

• Repeatedly use pwd and ls to check where you are and what files are present in this directory
• Run man and --help for learning more about a command
• Keep the Terminal Cheatsheet handy

Download

Go ahead and download this zip file. The files in this ZIP are a mess. Your task is to clean it up by creating proper directories, files, and more.

Unzip

Your first task is to unpack the ZIP file you just downloaded. unzip is a command that will help you do just that. Here is how to use the command:

unzip archive.zip # unpack a zip file into the folder that you are in (pwd)

Unzip the cs17-archive.zip file in your Desktop directory. This will create a new folder named cs17-archive. Rename this folder to terminal-assignment. This is your assignment folder: every task below happens inside it.

Peek Around

Before we begin with the tasks that modify the files, you should navigate through the directories, and see what is already there. Start by doing the following:

1. Find the competitions directory

• What is its parent directory?
• What is the absolute path for this folder?

2. Look for scrap.txt file

• What is its parent directory?
• What is the absolute path of this file?
• How many lines and words does this file contain?

3. Look for folders that contain images
4. Print the contents of the README.txt file and note down the entire directory structure in your notebook (you may not write full file names). This will help you with the tasks ahead.

Head and Tail

Some files are too long to read comfortably on one screen. Two new commands help you look at just a part of a file:

head -n 5 notes.txt # print only the first 5 lines of a file
tail -n 5 notes.txt # print only the last 5 lines of a file

Try them out:

1. Print only the first 10 lines of README.txt. Then print only the last 5 lines.
2. Print only the first line of club-members-attendance-register.txt. What are the column names?

New Directories

• Using the correct command, create three new folders in the terminal-assignment directory:
  • gallery
  • backup
  • sorted
• You can use ls to check if the folders were correctly created
• Inside the sorted directory create a folder named notes
• Inside the gallery directory, create a folder named competition-2026

Move Things

Now that we have the folders in place, let's start arranging files. Here is what you need to do:

1. List every jpg file in the "Unsorted Camera Dump" folder (try to use absolute path + tab completion instead of typing the full filename).
2. Move every one of these jpg files into the gallery folder you created in the last step.
3. But wait, there is more, png is also an image, move all png files too into the gallery directory.
4. Move camera-settings-backup.txt into sorted/notes.
5. Move the 3 competition entries (inside inbox/competitions/photography-competition-entries-2026) into gallery/competition-2026.
6. Create a copy of every txt file in logs folder into the backup.
7. Move old-notes.txt (locate it in your assignment folder first) into sorted/notes. Then rename this file to last-year-notes.txt.
8. Copy the Term 2 report into sorted/notes. The original must stay in documents/reports.

Clean Up

We moved files into relevant folders. But that left behind unused empty folders and some useless files too. Let's remove those:

1. Find and delete the scrap.txt file. Its parent directory will then become empty, delete that too.
2. Delete the "Unsorted Camera Dump" and old-phone-photos directory.
3. Delete the temp folder along with all its contents, it had done its job a long time ago.
4. Delete competitions/photography-competition-entries-2026 folder.

Much better. You can now clear the screen if you have not already done so.

Search

Start by locating the file named club-members-attendance-register.txt.

1. Print all the lines in this file that contain the word present. How many such lines are there?
2. Print all the lines in this file that contain the word absent. How many lines?

Now, create a new file attendance.txt in the same folder as the above file and add the following to attendance.txt file:

• The text "Present"
• Number of lines with the word present
• The text "Absent"
• Number of lines with the word absent

At the end, the file contents should look something like this (example numbers):

Present
14
Absent
20

First and Last Day

The attendance register is sorted by date: the oldest club day is at the top and the latest one is at the bottom. Each club day has 6 lines, one per member.

1. Print the attendance for the first club day. (Remember, the first line of the file is the column names.)
2. Print the attendance for the last club day. Who was absent?
3. Create a new file last-day.txt in the same folder that contains only the 6 lines of the last club day.

Install New Commands

There are a lot of different commands that come out of the box with your default shell software: ls, zip, mkdir, etc. But that is not it: people all over the world have built different shell commands (programs) that you can install and use. One such program is cowsay, which as the name implies, will do this:

 $ cowsay "CS17 Army ROCKS" # command
 _________________
< CS17 Army ROCKS >
 -----------------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

As you can see, whatever argument you pass, it will print a cow saying that piece of text 😂

If you try to run the above command, it will tell you that the command is not found, because it is not installed by default on your computer. Just like you installed Google Chrome from the internet, you will have to install cowsay. You don't need to leave your terminal to do this. You can just run:

sudo apt install cowsay

Try to use the command yourself with some text!

Task

Create a surprise.txt file at the root of your assignment directory and redirect the output of cowsay with "Hello from <replace-with-your-name>!" into this file. Wait, there is one more thing, you have to add something more to the file, cowsay "Bye from <replace-with-your-name>!".

So, at the end, the file should contain two of them.

History

Promise, this is the last one :)

You have to create a new history.txt file at the root (i.e. directly in that folder, not inside a nested folder) of your assignment folder. Then fill this with the last 200 commands from your history.

The history command prints every command you have ever run, which is a lot more than we need. To keep only the last 200 lines, you can send the output of one command into another command using the pipe (|) symbol:

history | tail -n 5 # print only the last 5 commands from your history

Change the number and redirect the result into history.txt.

Re-ZIP

It is time to compress our revamped directory, use the zip command (find how to use it) to compress the terminal-assignment directory, with the name terminal-assignment.zip.

Submission

Submit terminal-assignment.zip from your student dashboard.